Visegrad Genocide Denial

This examination of the denial of genocide atVisegrad looks at three specific examples: a documentary called ”Na Drini Grobnica”(”Grave on the river Drina”), the works of Momir Krsmanovic, a Serb writer from Visegrad, and the Visegrad report of the Committee for Collecting Data on Crimes Committed Against Humanity and International Law.

1.”Na Drini Grobnica” is a documentary produced by the so-called Concentration Camp Survivors from Republika Srpska organization (”Saveza logoraša Republike Srpske”), featuring the organisation’s Visegrad section (”Regionalnog udruženja logoraša iz Višegrada”). It was produced in 2007 and since then has been repeatedly aired on Republika Srpska TV as well as being available online. One of the people who worked on this ‘documentary’ was Slavko Heleta, a journalist in Visegrad. In addition to making this documentary, they have also organized two conferences on ”Crimes committed against Serbs in Upper Podrinje”. The organization is very close to the SNSD (Alliance of Independent Social Democrats), the party of Republika Srpska Prime Minister and genocide denier Milorad Dodik. The organization’s former vice-president Slavko Jovicic Slavuj, now a member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Parliament, voted along with all the other Serb representatives in the BH Parliament against proposed legislation that would outlaw Holocaust and Genocide denial. The proposed legislation was based on the EU Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia.

2. Momir Krsmanovic, is a notorious Serb author from Visegrad. He wrote the popular novel ”’Even God wept over Eastern Bosnia” (”I Bog je zaplakao nad Istocnom Bosnom”) which deals with ”crimes against the Serb people in Eastern Bosnia”. According to his offical website (http://www.momir-krsmanovic.com/), Momir Krsmanovic was a survivor of Ustasa crimes committed at Sjemec near Visegrad in 1941. He survived these atrocities because ”Almigthy looked after him”. He boasts that he was able to write ”Even God wept over Eastern Bosnia” in a monastery on Mount Ozren thanks to Vasilija Kacavenda, the infamous Bishop of Zvornik who was very close to Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Kacavenda built his own residence on confiscated Bosniak property in Zvornik and is notorious for refusing to remove the Church built on the property of Nana Fata (”Granny Fata”) near Srebrenica.

Krsmanovic publicly brags about his close connections with the Orthodox Church (see here). His book is written as a historical novel, supposedly based on eye-witness accounts. It makes no mention of Serb crimes, instead Krsmanovic describes Bosniaks slaughtering Serbs and dumping them in the Drina river, rapes by Bosniaks etc. The novel is fascist propaganda aimed at young Serbs in Eastern Bosnia, like the film ”Pretty Village, Pretty Flame”. Krsmanovic is also the author of ”The Blood-Stained Hands of Islam”, ”The Bloody Drina Flows” etc.

3. TheCommittee for Collecting Data on Crimes Committed Against Humanity and International Law was formed during the war with the primary aim of spreading propaganda about crimes committed against Serbs in Bosnia. The committee produced a report on every town, especially Visegrad. These reports were used by Slobodan Milosevic’s defense at The Hague and can be found online. The committee gathered information from the courts in Visegrad. Two names recur: Judge Radmila Radisavljevic (later Zeljko Lelek’s defense lawyer) and Prosecutor Lazar Drasko (later a defense witness for Milan Lukic in the Sjeverin trial). Drasko is still a prosecutor in the Bosnian Federal courts and the authorities have ignored victims’ calls for his suspension. Radisaljevic is working as a lawyer in Visegrad. It is important to note that neither comes from Visegrad – Drasko is from Capljina and Radisaljevic from Zenica. Victims have repeatedly called for the criminal prosecution of both, but the authorities have ignored those calls. The most infamous case involving these two is that of Abdullah Kahriman, a Bosnian Army soldier captured by the Bosnian Serb Army near Visegrad. Kahriman escaped from Visegrad in ’92 and joined the resistance. He was captured, interrogated by the Visegrad authorities, tortured and forced to confess to war crimes. His forced confession is used by the Committee and also used in the propagandist documentary ”Grave on the River Drina”. His whereabouts are unknown. He was last seen in Visegrad, in the custody of the court authorities. He was probably murdered.

These are the three sources of information concerning Visegrad or Eastern Bosnia to be found on Serb websites. More recent evidence of genocide denial by Visegrad Serbs can be found in comments in Internet forums, Facebook discussion groups etc.: ”What happened, happened! Let’s look towards the future”, ”The war ended 15 years ago. Don’t talk about it!”, ”I really don’t know why you people left, you are welcome to return any time”, ”We all committed crimes, now let’s not talk about it”.

There is another aspect of denial that particularly concerns Visegrad – the Lukicization of war crimes. This is the tendency to place the blame for every war crime committed in Visegrad on Milan Lukic. It seems now that Lukic himself ordered and executed every crime committed in Visegrad. But don’t forget, Milan Lukic was a member of the Visegrad Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army. This is an established fact, mentioned at the Sjeverin trial and confirmed by Branimir Savovic (SDS President) and Luka Dragicevic (Commander of the Visegrad Brigade). Lukic had a superior. He received orders and he obeyed orders. There is a chain of responsibility behind the commission of these crimes.

And finally, last but not least, it is worth repeating that the main role in the Visegrad genocide was played by the Crisis Committee in the Visegrad Municipality.

The propaganda documentary “Na Drini Grobnica” shows dead bodies of Bosniak civilians on the bank of the river Drina and presents them as ‘Serb victims.’ This type of Serbian propaganda is nothing new, but it must be vigorously challenged by us. These types of Serbian lies are poison for the future peace.

I will repeat it one more time: Documentaries like “Noz” and “Na Drini Grobnica” are Serbian propaganda videos that used footages of murdered Bosniak civilians in Visegrad, Foca, and other towns, and then presented them as Serb casualties. Bosniak civilians in Podrinje were murdered “en masse” by Serbs and then thrown into the Drina River. Their bodies floated and ended up on various River banks.

this enrages me to no end. The criminal trying to turn the victim into perpetrator again. It gibe me a greatz notion that Bosniaks have all the right in the world to nukllify the genocidal creation “Republika Srpska” by military means. And since the names of all those evil subjkects and their faces are known, they should do their utmost to capture them alive. They should hang singns stating their crimes round their necks and parade them through the streets so that people can throw their shoes, or rotten eggs or tomatoes at them. And since the ICTY can’t be trusted to judge them and to dispense justice, as the cases of Biljana Plavsic and Radovan Karadzic shows, they must be then summarily executed and their corpses must be burnt and the ashes scattered into the wind. Their relatives must be expelled to Serbia (I’d even have themn SWIM across teh Drina!) Why? because these hateful creatures have resigned from the human race!
Look. I’m not a racist nor a chauvinist and I am sure that there are a lot of decent Serbs about. But each and everyone who in any way is connected to or defends the anti-Bosniaks crusade has indeed resigned from the human race, and since their relatives are just the same (people have a very deep family sense in Bosnia) they must, for sake of Bosnia’s safety, forever removed from it. Only those Serbs can be allowed to stay in Bosnia who expressly and honestly distance themselves from the genocidal anti-Bosniak crusade. I have until now tried to restrain myself and not to subscribe to the viewpoint “Srbe na vrbe!”, but the more such articles I read and the more revisionist and genocide-denying drivel or Bosniak-baiting I read the more I just plainly HATE those people and wish to do unto them what they did with the Bosniaks (except that I would not want teenage Bosnian Serb girls to be raped. Either wipe out utterly all those who are recalcitrant and send the rest to reeducation camps and resettle them in isolated areas where they can never pose a danger to Bosniaks, or take away their youngest children and adopt them into the strictest Muslim families. True, that is most cruel, but in face of all the cruelties they did to the Bosniaks, is it not deserved? It is not enough to put those inhuman chetnik scum before judgment, they must be stripped of the last of their worldly possessions and be made to experience to the last all inhumanity they let loose on the Bosniaks who never had done any one of them any harm! They must be rendered harmless, and if this means obliterating them (and I mean obliterate in the sense that their corpses must be buerned and all and any traces of their earthly presence destroyed, even to erasing of burning the birth registers and destroying the graves of their forebears) then so be it! Because of all their denial and cynical inhuman behavior I would like to break their very souls!

May God give the Bosniaks victory over theri enemies, and then that all copies, books, videos, hard disks and otehr storage media containing that POISON are heaped in the middle of teh square in Visegrad and BURNED! And I would even force a Serb to light the fire! And all those who wrote that poison must be stripped of theri Bosnian citizenship and of all civil rights and be given notice to leave Bosnia with the formal prohibition ever to return even for their descendants to the seventh generation. They shoulsd be even forced to dig up their dead and take them with them, and if somebody thinks that is too cruel, I say let them experience all the inhumanity they unleashed on the Bosniaks, and I would like to break their very souls. I wish them that they realize one day how evil they are and then commit suicide.

Abdul Majid, it is the powers responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Dayton Accords that they negotiated who should be responsible for abolishing Republika Srpska because it was them to their eternal shame that allowed this misbegotten product of genocide to come into being and then allowed it to persist in its blind disregard of the provisions of the Accords.

Yes, but they will not do it. I just read this:
“Clinton said US allies in Europe blocked proposals to adjust or remove the embargo. They justified their opposition on plausible humanitarian grounds, arguing that more arms would only fuel the bloodshed, but privately, said the president, key allies objected that an independent Bosnia would be ‘unnatural’ as the only Muslim nation in Europe [sic]. He said they favoured the embargo precisely because it locked in Bosnia’s disadvantage. Worse, he added, they parried numerous alternatives as a danger to the some eight thousand European peacekeepers deployed in Bosnia to safeguard emergency shipments of food and medical supplies. They challenged US standing to propose shifts in policy with no American soldiers at risk. While upholding their peacekeepers as a badge of commitment, they turned these troops effectively into a shield for the steady dismemberment of Bosnia by Serb forces.
When I expressed shock at such cynicism, reminiscent of the blind-eye diplomacy regarding the plight of Europe’s Jews during World War II, President Clinton only shrugged. He said President François Mitterrand of France had been especially blunt in saying that Bosnia did not belong, and that British officials also spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe. ” (excerpt from: The Clinton Tapes: wrestling history with the President, by Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, New York, September 2009. On http://www.bosnia.org.uk, uploaded Sept.2009.) And I think that many European leaders still think that way. They are so incredibly FOOLISH! What good will it do for nobody to have a second Palestinan conflict in the heart of Europe? What message are they sending Muslims worldwide? And do not forget, those who planned and executed Sept. 11th, 2001, took the genocidal serb anti-Bosniak crusade as their pretext. Cncretely Nov. 09.,1993 (destruction of the Stari Most). Now, since it is not possible for people with such power to be so imbecile as to antagonize the Muslims further, I think they’re doing it on purpose. There are some circles interested in a “clash of civilizations”. Otherwise, all the West’s antagonizing of peoples who happen to be Muslims and all the comments and statements -and actions- hostile to Muslims can’t be explained. Has anybody told these people that we no longer live in the time of the Crusades?
May Allah help the Bosniaks. They will need His help most bitterly. They’re not out of the woods. For now, nothing much will happen, but in April we could see a repeat of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, or of the Georgian war. And it will bring about more ethnic cleansing, rape, murder, genocide and destruction of priceless cultural heritage. Unless by some miracle or by God’s mercy the Bosniaks could have the upper hand. And even then Europe will try to isolate and to strangle them “because they are Muslims, and Muslims = terrorists.”

I agree on the foolishness, and I find it very sad that so much of the talk going on about the current discussions, while it may be necessary for diplomatic purposes, still assumes that all parties will be bringing equal faith to the table. Republika Srpska is the offspring of genocide. Every time Dodik opens his mouth he shows that the leopard has not changed its spots. And yet this man and his ill-begotten administrative notion are concerned suitable partners for dialogue.

Any inclination by European nations to support Serbia because Bosnia was a nation of Muslims – and the evidence seems to suggest that that was a factor, even if it was not the only one, was a racist betrayal of the European ideal that was supposed to have emerged from the ashes of World War II.

Exactly, Owen.
Btw, I don’t hate the Serbs. I have gone through the lists of fallen soldiers of the Armija, and every time I come across a name that is obviously Serb or Croat I am overjoyed that they were willing to – and indeed did – give their lives for Bosnia-Herzegovina, for their Bosniak friends, and chose not the path of evil and genocide; at the same time I am disappointed that there were so little. Anyway, a man like Jovan Divjak has my admiration, or that Serb of Zvornik who was murdered by Arkan’s men because he helped some Bosniaks to escape (without demanding anything in return!). Or that Bosnian Serb woman of Sarajevo who raised an orphan Muslim child like her own (but she did not try to change his faith!).
But I do HATE the Chetniks! I wish them and their ideologies to be thrown back into Hades where they belong.
But, if and when the Bosniaks should be compelled to regain the unity of their country by force (when Dodik really pulls off his referendum or declars indpendence of “RS” unilaterally): how can they do it without antagonizing those Bosnian Serbs who would not do them any wrong? How can they tell them from the genocidals (except of course for those genocidals whose names and faces are known)? And, if a majority of Bosnian serbs is still for genocide and ethnic cleansing, and must therefore be expelled from Bosnia lest they try genocide again, how can the Bosniaks avoid being accused of genocide? (The Serbs will accuse them of genocide anyway, but it should be possible to refute any such accusations.)

How can Dodik have a referendum? It’s all part of his campaign to build up tension and create an atmosphere in which the less resolute members of the international community decide that it’s less trouble to let him have his way. As if.